Online Printing Services
If you wish to have longer lasting prints than dye-based printers can provide and can't afford a printer that employs pigments, try a service that offers Fuji Crystal Archive photographic paper like Shutterfly at www.shutterfly.com or find advanced inkjet printers that use pigment inks like West Coast Imaging.

Online printing service Shutterfly has an easy to use online interface for uploading pictures and ordering prints from your picture files. It takes about a week to get prints delivered here in Ohio. The majority of Shutterfly's business is selling photographic print products to everyday consumers.

Shutterfly also has options for professional photographers who wish to set up professional galleries of work for sale over the web. For example, a wedding photographer could upload photographs and provide the wedding party with a link to a gallery made specifically for the event. The photographer sets their own prices for the work, chooses what print sizes are offered online, and Shutterfly handles all the business transactions (credit card billing, mailing, etc.). Profits accrue to the photographer depending on how many pictures are sold and the pricing set by the photographer. There are various fees for Shutterfly's professional service depending upon how much online storage you need for your pictures.

While the majority of Shutterfly's business is photographic prints, they also offer picture mugs, puzzles, keepsake boxes, mouse pads and photo books. For a pro account holder, you can make these available to your customers.

Setting up a Shutterfly Pro Account:
First, set up a normal consumer Shutterfly account - it costs nothing to do. Go to www.shutterfly.com to do that.

After you have created a standard consumer account, then contact Jonathan Levers  jlevers@shutterfly.com using your OU email account to request the Pro account options.

Among the advantages of using Shutterfly over using an Epson printer is that you never have to worry about clogged nozzles again!

Dot Gain
Dot gain is the tendency of ink halftone dots to grow in size when printed on a printing press. It's an undesirable side effect when printing on absorbent papers with wet inks.

Dot gain is caused by wicking of the ink into the paper fibers combined with the pressures applied by squeezing rollers to the paper. Coated papers, not being as porous as uncoated papers, have a smaller dot gain than uncoated papers.

Dot gain also limits the size of the dots that can be applied to paper. Because newsprint wicks ink more readily than coated papers, tiny halftone dots would grow enough to fill the small white spaces between dots. This destroys image reproduction. As a result, screen frequencies (which determines the dot size) are lower for newsprint.

The following chart lists some typical dot gain percentages when printing (data from Real World Photoshop 3, Blatner & Fraser, Peachpit Press 1996):

Rasterizing EPS or AI Graphics into Bitmaps for Printing to Non-PostScript   Printers
Freehand and Adobe Illustrator create vector art that, by nature, does not have resolution associated with the picture. They always print at the resolution of the printer - meaning that if you use a very high resolution imagesetter, you will benefit by having the image rendered at thousands of dots per inch. Vector artwork is not comprised of a grid of pixels, but rather a mathematical description of curves, fills, etc. that are independent of resolution concerns.

Freehand and Illustrator users commonly export their files in the EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) format for use in page design programs like QuarkXPress, InDesign, or others. Unfortunately  EPS files embedded in the documents for of these programs require a PostScript printer to satisfactorily render the graphic. If you are using an Epson printer (not PostScript capable), the image will likely print with the "jaggies" showing because it is printing just the low-res screen preview that is attached to the file.

There are several possible workarounds for printing documents that have embedded EPS or AI graphics to Epson printers. One method is to use the PostScript rasterizer that is built into Adobe Acrobat (rasterize = change from vector art to a picture made of pixels). The procedure is to print the file containing the EPS graphics to Acrobat Distiller (the PostScript interpreting engine part of Acrobat) and create an Acrobat file with the graphics rasterized. This requires several steps, and is fraught with possible errors like poor selections in Acrobat's preferences, etc.

Another way to permit EPS graphics to print well to non-PostScript printers is to use Photoshop to rasterize the vector artwork. After rasterization, the file can be saved as an ordinary TIF file for placement in the page design program. Photoshop permits any reasonable choice of resolutions to be chosen for the task.

Another hurdle is that often EPS files from vector art programs like Freehand is that they are in CMYK color format. If you opt to bring it in as an RGB or Grayscale file, it uses the inverse of the RGB>CMYK or Gray>CMYK conversion and the CMYK dot gain and/or undercolor removal settings cause the file not to have a true black where there should be one. The following steps show how to choose a proper resolution for the graphic and to overcome the tendency to open without having a true black.

Open the file called deardrf2.eps in Exercises 6. You should get a dialog box that asks what size and resolution you wish to use to open the file as shown below.

Choose whatever size you need (one advantage of an EPS graphic is that you can resize it with no loss of resolution), and choose an appropriate resolution (for a b/w line-art graphic, it should be 600 pixels/inch, but remember the file size could be huge when it opens in CMYK format). If you have b/w line art, uncheck Anti-aliased. When printed, an anti-aliased line art graphic may appear to have a fuzzy edge which is undesirable.

When you click OK, the graphic will open in Photoshop, become comprised of pixels, and cease to be a vector graphic. That's called Rasterizing the file.

You will notice that the graphic will open possibly with transparent areas around it, indicating that the Layers palette doesn't have a true Background Layer. Flatten the image to view it normally. (In the Layers Palette, click the arrow on the upper right to display the drop down list of choices, and choose Flatten Image).

Save the file as a plain TIF file for placement in Quark, Word, InDesign or other program, and it should now print easily to non-PostScript printers like an Epson.

Colors or tones may not exactly match when rasterizing a CMYK Graphic into RGB or grayscale. I put optional notes on another page for the curious.

As mentioned before, this tool can easily be overdone and the picture starts to look artificial. Use this tool wisely.